Strategic visitor flows and destination management organization

The relevance of the monitoring of visitor flows (VF), namely the general or aggregate patterns of travellers’ movements in a given area is twofold. On the one hand, they are relevant for the spatial description of travel networks. On the other hand, VF patterns are challenging traditional organization of destination management (DM) and are becoming a strategic tool. VFs are useful for reshaping the DM organization’s governance model from a static-central model to a dynamic network. The aim of this research is to estimate SVF using the data movement recorded by a test carried out with an anonymised and highly aggregated mobile phone data set, provided by Swisscom—the major Swiss mobile company. This research sheds some light on the relevance of VF in the understanding and improving of DM organization governance. Furthermore, it provides evidence of the existence of SVF at different levels of geographical scale obtained by network analysis techniques.